I started reading Emma (Austen) today! The comforts of a story being linearly narrated are manifold, I missed that! (Both my previous books were confused narrations which switched here and there and totally left me in reading-epilepsy, I liked that too, it’s good to be back nonetheless) This story is also written in late-18th century English with the whole flourish and the Keira Knightley and Rosamund Pike-esque characters. Emma Woodhouse’ introduction was solid, Mr. Knightley just entered the scene!
(That applies to Tuesdays this semester)
Meanwhile, fun fact, most of my previous posts have been really late, about 30 minutes before midnight or hours after midnight. I love Git for this extent of statistics...
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Okay, I can feel this being a short post. It’s just that I am in the phase between two books where I haven’t committed to anything just yet. Emma (Austen) is waiting to be picked up. That book is in the public domain, and the people at Amazon are really nice to put it up on the Kindle store and save everyone the trouble of having to download it and copy it over to the Kindle!
An interesting thing that I discovered today was the total number of passengers that use the Indian Railway system each year. The number is HUGE. It’s HUGE, it’s like nothing I would have imagined. Before seeing the figures, I made a rough estimate of...
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Finally, I got the 1 hour I needed to finish Handmaid’s Tale. A detailed review is up on Goodreads: here.
After finishing this, I got to thinking about whether I should compare this with the other dystopias that I have read. The most influential of these was 1984 (Orwell). A surveillance state with some horrible restrictions on everything and horrible food for everyone who was not a proper Inner Government official. Gilead is a different world, of course. There are stricter observations, but almost no surveillance. Instead this is replaced by a complex heirarchial system among women that ends up in all of them keeping a wary eye on each other for possible signs of betrayal, laziness, non-adherance to...
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There were some serious production issues in the past couple of posts. The images were not properly downloaded (I downloaded them using wget and that didn’t work out), titles were not right, categories weren’t added. I have fixed all of that now, there was even a spelling mistake, a hilarious one too. I had mis-spelled synced as sinked, I didn’t even notice it when I was typing!
Anyway, the quality of everything should improve from here on out, I am going to visit the post and skim it right after posting. I think I should talk about why I am using Jekyll for this whole series and also as my primary blog when there...
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I am reading Force and Opinion, an essay that was posted on Metakgp Slack, when I posted my surprise at having found the Internet Shutdowns in India. I am still reading it, but it sounds like a solid thing to talk about in another post. I should maintain a TODO list of topics that I want to talk about. (I am now switching to Trello to create that list)
The mouse thing happened again. This Ubuntu was started only about 3 hours ago. This is extremely frustrating, I don’t want to go through the pain of re-installing Ubuntu all over again with the right configuration and I don’t want to have to keep restarting the PC. That would...
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Yeah, I missed it. But this is fine, I don’t blame anyone for this. I slept and woke up knowing exactly what I had done. I think the repenting part is more important than just missing it. (It also means I can sit down for 1 hour and write continuously about something that I haven’t decided yet!)
Today was the Eastern Groups performance for the Social-Cultural General Championship in IIT Kharagpur. These are inter-hostel competitions which are elaborately arranged, practiced for and performed. It’s kind of a big deal for everyone involved. I have done it since my second year. (Our hostel’s performance was around 2330-2355 last night. I now know that we won the Gold medal for our performance!)
That excerpt is from On Air with AIB, the first off script segment in season 2. It’s completely true!
On the happy side, I am 78% through with Handmaid’s Tale! The story has spiraled completely off the charts. The backstory is finally pieced together now, and the present has taken center stage with some INCREDIBLE stuff happening. The commander’s character had a surprising amount of depth, and when they finally revealed (was it obvious?) that he was in one of the top positions because of which all these privileges were accorded to him, I was rather surprised that he was so different about something that he...
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YES! I think that everyone reading this is going to think 1 of 2 things:
(a) A fourth year engineering student is getting so excited about getting an LED to blink on an Arduino? Are you kidding me? AMATEUR!
(b) What is the big deal?
Well, a back story is in order. I have been a part of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle since February 2014. That was the second semester of my first year, since then I have seen people around me in the Embedded and Electronics teams of this research group do stuff with Arduino, other micro controllers, small computers like Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black or Intel Galileo. I never really meddled...
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Today, I watched this video. That video linked to The Game of Thrones Research Project which is a group of people who have put out a public questinnaire and are keeping the responses open for a period of time. They plan to do something with the results and entries that they are going to get from it. Apparently, this kind of thing falls into the genre of Audience Projects.
There is a longer explanation of what they plan to do with the data, and what they hope to learn from it on this page, and theses goals are mentioned there:
(1) To capture the range of responses that people have to the series, overall...
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Ah, finally! FINALLY! 55% into the book, Margaret Atwood thought it appropriate to reveal the circumstances that lead to the world that Offred and Ofglen and Of* live in. It was terrifying! I think I can now see where the comparison to 1984 comes from. I can’t really talk about it here without marking it as a spoiler for everyone who plans to read this book, so I would much rather talk about it once I have read the whole book and this particular event has more context around it. That said, this is a great book, I can make that judgement on the basis of whatever I have read till now. It has been amazing! Sure, the author took...
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